11 Responses to “New York Times on Proposition 66”

Um, Patterico, you must not understand. This is the New York Times, and they are a very smart and sophisitcated bunch of journalists who are authorized to pronounce authoritatively on any controversy in the world. We should be honored that they care what happens way out here in CA, and grateful for their attention.

“What do you want to bet I don’t get one damned reasoned response to this question?” It’s funny that you asked this in another post, considering the lack of reasoning in your response to the Times. As far as I can tell, your rebuttal to the Times boils down to “They’re in New York – therefore they should shut up!” Not exactly compelling logic.

My bet is that the NY Times has thousands of readers in California, which makes it perfectly reasonable for them to address California political issues.

I’ve never agreed with the “only people directly affected by this issue may legitimately express an opinion on it” logic. I don’t agree with it when some women say that men shouldn’t express opinions about abortion, and I don’t agree with it when you say that only Californians should express opinions about Measure 66. The argument is good, or it is not; who speaks the argument shouldn’t matter.

I’m not saying that you don’t have reasoned responses in your other posts. I’m saying that your direct response to the Times in this post is unreasonable. That other posts of yours may be good doesn’t magically rescue your mistaken logic in this post.

In essence, your argument in this particular post is an ad hominom argument. The substance of the Times editors argument (for better or worse) doesn’t change because they’re in New York; someone in California could in principle put forward identical arguments. Therefore, it’s no response to the arguments to say “you’re a New Yorker, so butt out.”

I’m not sure where I come down on this. At one level, I have to agree with Amp, everyone is entitled to opine on anything. At another, it has been my experience that even the most politically knowledgeable people often make comically basic errors when discussing issues local to other jurisdictions, which they think they understand but invariably don’t. I got a lot of that last year over the recall, mostly from stodgy, East Coast Republicans from states that don’t even have recalls, lecturing us Californians about how our recall law was supposedly intended to work, how crazy we Californians were to even consider electing a cyborg as governor, etc. It got rather tiresome.

In this case, the NYT editorial doesn’t strike me as any more ignorant or knee-jerk than, or even all that different from, the crap we’ve been reading for months in the L.A. Times, the Orange County Register, or countless other papers up and down the state. Unlike these papers, however, the NYT does not seriously cover California issues on a regular basis, and thus will have no accountability at all if/when the intiative passes, and lo and behold, all that allegedly absent convincing evidence of thugs flooding the streets turned out to be accuracte after all. The Dog Trainer will have some ‘splaining to do, and the Register even more, but the NYT will just move on to some other issue they know little about in some other state they know nothing about.

You make some good points, at least in your latest comment. However . . .

My basic point is that I am sick of hearing ignorant opinions from know-it-all editorial writers on topics they know nothing about. Given that the Times‘s arguments are fatuous, it’s doubly galling that they come from editors who don’t have to live with the consequences.

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